They were called demons because they were horrible and came from the Other….

Dimension Demons

1980

Metagaming

I dug this one out last night and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.  Looking at the game over the years I couldn’t imagine how the game could work: the units available just seemed so limited!  Of course, it turns out each unit is balanced to fit into the setting… and the Demon player can get along just fine without heavy or fast units because of his happenin’ transportation powers.

The game utilizes a split map.  Demons transport to the human colony mapside and attack it.  They only hang around for a single turn and pop back to their corresponding hex neighborhood after a brief moment of mayhem.  If they can enter a city hex, they build a transport on the human side… which allows them both to hang around indefinitely unless they get more than 5 hexes away from it.  A transport built on the human side also allows the Demons to bring a Breeder slug over… and the Breeder will produce a new permanent Demon on the human side once per turn if it stays within 5 hexes of that transport.

The human player has mostly infantry units– which are much tougher to kill if they are in their cities.  He also has Thumper and Slider armor units… and his roads give him high mobility.  Demons have volcanoes on their side of the map… volcanoes that will kill them if they accidently pop back on them!  Yay.

The game play breaks down to a clear opening, middle game, and end game.  In the opening, the Demon player sends Demons over for hit and run raids.  He can also opt for a hit and die raid: if he teleports onto another unit, both are destroyed.  (This is a good way to get rid of those pesky Thumpers….)  The Demon player is inlikely to get killed unless he lands on a unit or city by accident….  And it takes at least two demons operating together to get even a small chance to kill an infantry in a city.  The human player must remain spread out because the Demon can attack anywhere at any moment.  The demon player has fewer units, though, and cannot afford to exchange units very many times.

In the middle game, the Demons are attempting to take and hold a city.  They concentrate to the weakest area of the human colony and dig in.  If things don’t look good they can opt not to build a transport, pop back, and try again somewhere else.  But if they commit to holding the city, they will send the breeders over and hope to survive long enough to produce some serious Demon power.  Note that the Humans can possibly take over a Demon transport and make a counter attack to the weaker Demon world.

In the end game, the Demons and Humans fight to the death… or if the Demons were repulsed from their city… they regroup and try again.  At this point, both sides are seriously reduced in the number of units they can field.  Every lucky hit and accident counts big time here and tension can be really great.

In our game, I was quite lucky in the opening.  I terrorized the humans taking very few losses… and exchanged 3 Demons for 1 Thumper and 2 Sliders.  In the middle game, I sent 4 demons to attack one double-city.  We took it, and the following turn I sent in two Warrior-Breeder pairs over.  One of the pairs teleported onto an infantry counter!  I also failed to defend my cities well and my human side transport was destroyed.  I built another in an undefended city, but my breeder was delayed in producing new Demon Warriors.  The terrible accident combined with the tactical failure cost me the game.  I simply did not have enough material to mount another major attack.  I did manage to terrorize my opponent for a few more turns, taking out an infantry unit or two before one of my last remaining demons popped back into a volcano….

All and all, this was a surprising and unusual game.  The luck factor will probably annoy modern players as several turns can go by with the Demons teleporting and neither taking nor giving any casualties.  There are tactics that reduce the luck factor, but in the heat of battle they can easily be forgotten.  Once the middle game is reached, a quick and bloody battle will ensue that has an entirely different flavor than the hit and run segment.  It took us an hour to read the rules and set up… and about two hours to play our first game.  Of course, you can’t truly understand a new game until you’ve played it 5 times at least… but we were intrigued enough to want to invest the time to do that.  (Next time I play the Human Freefeet colonists….  I suspect my opponent has some nasty tactics to spring on me… slagging key cities with his teleport accidents so that my mobility is undermined and such like….)

Bravo, Metagaming… we miss you.

Car Wars Podcasts… and lotsa vintage Micro-games!

I finally got to listen to the MADHAT Car Wars podcasts and episode 4 of the Roll2D6 pocasts.  The MADHAT shows are delivered in a downhome Tennessee twang by a diehard Car Wars fanatic that runs several PBEM games– and his coverage of those games has inspired my to check ‘em out.  This podcast-jockey (?) had 11 people sign up for his most recent game and 5 of those were repeat players. 

The Roll2D6 podcast had slightly better production values; it came off more like a real radio talk show because the two hosts banter back and forth so much.  The Car Wars fanatic would try to describe the history of his favorite game while the other fellow cracked jokes!  On the other hand, the Madhat show scores many MONDO grooviness points for letting out the secret of the DwarfStar games web pages.  Follow the link to find a gold mine in classic gaming goodness!

Digging In To GURPS Powers

Here’s my first attempt at building something with GURPS 4e and Powers.  I noticed early on that this ain’t anything like designing vehicles for Car Wars.  With Car Wars, you pick a body-size and start loading it up with goodies– it’s not much more complicated than going grocery shopping provided you can add and multiply.  With GURPS, you think of a character or power… and then you attempt to model it with the rules.  This makes things much more subjective and you can waste a lot of time figuring out the best way to do things and then still feel like you’ve made a bad design decision or broken a rule.

Anyways, the advantage I’ve worked up was inspired by several different games of the 80’s.  First was the “Solar Power” from Heroes Unlimited.  Basically it just gave a die of damage per level of your character.  This was pretty disappointing.  Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had an entry on mutant stegasauruses with funny solar powers resulting from the weird plates on their backs.  This was more interesting.  I played Gamma World back then a lot more than the Palladium stuff, so I attempted to come up with some new mutant abilities for that game, but eventually abandoned it in frustration.  But now with GURPS Powers, I’ve got the tools to actually finish my rough ideas….

Heat Wave (+300%) Affliction-1 (Biological, -10%; Cone 13 hexes wide, +180%; Contact Agent, +150%; Stunning, +10%; Secondary Affect– Attribute Penalty -4 to ST, DX, and HT and -2 to IQ, +20%; Increased 1/2 D x5, +20%; All-Out, -25%; Costs 3 FP, -15%) [40]

This attack creates a wave of intense heat that stuns the victims and in some cases causes a heat exhaustion that can last minutes.  At range 1-10, the attack is resisted with a HT roll.  At range 11-20, the attack is resisted at HT+3.  (Note that the victim can roll each second to break out of the stun if he fails the first time.)  If the resistance roll is missed by 5 or more the victim suffers the attribute penalty.  Note that it actually costs 4 FP to use because of the biological modifier.

A note on the cone: it’s 1 hex wide at range 1-3, 3 hexes wide at range 4-6, 5 hexes wide at range 7-9, 7 hexes wide at range 10-12, 9 hexes wide at range 13-15, 11 hexes wide at range 16-18, and 13 hexes wide at range 19-20.

I just spotted a possible error in my design….  Do I need to pay the +10% for stunning when the Attribute Penalty is only a secondary affect?  Hmm….  Dunno.  Well… I’ll hit the books.  I cringe at the thought of posting this on the SJGames board– it’d break my heart at this point to find out that there’s a much more appropriate way to build this thing after I spent 2 hours fiddling with it!

Things Man Was Not Meant To Know

I recently picked up the 20th anniversary edition of TRON on DVD.  Excellent stuff.  I learned a lot of stuff about my favorite movie via the healthy dose of extras. 

The guys that made TRON were cartoonists.  They made some of the weirder sequences that appeared on Sesame Street and The Electric Company.  Their big score came when they were signed on to make a whole slew of cartoons for the 1980 Olympics– an entire “Animal Olympics” to run concurrently with the real thing.  Of course, the US ended up boycotting the Olympics that year, so the cartoons never ran…. 

TRON’s the first movie to use computer animation.  There were no software tools to do this stuff back then… and everything had to be done from scratch.  It took four different companies to do all the graphics– each company had a jury-rigged software/hardware system that could do a slightly different thing.  In spite of their groundbreaking and cutting edge achievements, TRON did not receive any awards for animation: the judges felt that the fact that they used a computer was cheating! 

TRON was inspired by… PONG.  Yeah….  PONG.  Somehow the director had seen the game… and immediately he thought of gladiator games in the coliseum.  He must have been a really creative guy.  I played one of those in the late seventies and it mostly made me think of hockey….

Probably my favorite part of TRON was the music, but alas there was not much on the DVD about that part beyond just a couple of tunes from the lightcycle sequence and closing credits that failed to make the final cut.  I’d hoped to see an interview with the composer– a certain Wendy Carlos– who had his/her gender surgically altered.  Ah well, perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

There was one scene in the movie that the creators labored over excessively.  It was beautifully crafted and each frame took about twice as long to construct.  They got it just the way they wanted it and then… at the very end… it all hit the cutting room floor.

It was an electronic sex scene.

I couldn’t believe this.  I’d always thought of the program entities as being asexual automatons… and that maybe Flynn had shaken things up a bit by introducing the whole concept of kissing to them.  But no… the programs were… uh… well….  I guess you just have to see it to believe it.  Yes, I know this was a Disney movie!  But they even included an equally bizarre “morning after scene.”

Okay, okay.  It is “G rated,” but it will still blow your mind.